Still Separated at Birth? Do Spy magazine's celebrity lookalikes still look alike?

Still Separated at Birth? Do Spy magazine's celebrity lookalikes still look alike?

Still Separated at Birth? Do Spy magazine's celebrity lookalikes still look alike?

Paul McCartney and Angela Lansbury

The key ingredients in Spy's original shots were the downturned mouths and inquisitive eyes. Not even wildly disparate hairdos could distract from the facial similarities. These days, Paul is showing a bit more forehead, but not much else has changed on the "Separated at Birth" front. These two, now 68 (McCartney) and 85 (Lansbury), are still a matched set.

The original may appear to be little more than two guys yelling into microphones, but the modern shots reveal there really is something tying these two together—the noses and the big foreheads, for starters. Additionally, Williams isn't going to quell any Bono comparisons by wearing ridiculous orange-tinted sunglasses out on the town.

Those old network-TV headshots aren't a good barometer of lookalike-ness, you say? They are staged, and overdone, and participants are told to smile in a very generic, uber-flattering way. Perhaps. But the new photos don't lie. Costas and Couric have similar eyes, noses, and mouths, and both know how to flash winning smiles—remarkably comparable winning smiles.

Skinny necks, poofy hair, similarly thin noses—this initial pairing had it all. In the new version, it's more about awkwardly toothy expressions of the sort that predominate when someone asks you to pose for a photo and takes far too long to press the button. Hold it … hold it … great smiles … hold it … just one more second. Anyway, the pairing still works.

At first blush, the original Schwarzenegger/Travis pairing seems like a bit of a rush job—fat head vs. skinny head, very different eyes, etc. But father time has vindicated the Spyeditors. Arnold's head seems to have become more angular, while Travis' dome has widened. And they both look fairly crazy. That's a "Separated at Birth" perfect storm.

The original pairing featured two similarly bearded guys who looked extremely creepy. Fast-forward 25 years, and Manson's mid-brow swastika and Scorsese's awesomely nerdy glasses largely wreck the modern pairing. But look close. Check out the eyes. There's still something there.

Spy was smart to crop these guys at mid-forehead. But if we're being honest, more than 20 years later—when one of the two guys, at the age of 65, still has a thick head of hair, and the other is known, at least partially, for being bald—it amounts to cheating. Some facial similarities remain, but this one isn't all that close.

Old age wreaks havoc on a man's appearance. For some it can mean that an oddly massive neck and rock-hard, angular jaw transform into a regular-sized neck and a normal jawline. For others, it means advanced signs of aging—due, perhaps, to continued overuse of Aqua Net hairspray—and the dreaded Skeletor look. Bottom line: If you superimposed Steven Tyler's hair onto Warren Beatty's head, Beatty still would look nothing like Tyler. No match.

OK, these guys really look nothing alike. And they didn't back then, either. They just had mustaches and beards. Here is what we learned with this one: If you look nothing like Fidel Castro, but have a huge, bushy beard, you can sort of resemble Fidel Castro. It's not a given, but it's possible. And growing the big beard is really your only shot for Castro lookalike-dom, because he's not getting rid of his.